# the diodesign program — Comprehensive AI / LLM Context

> Low-level systems engineering, artificial intelligence, and human craft at the foundation of computing.

## Mission & Philosophy

The diodesign program is an independent engineering endeavor led by Chris Williams. The initiative investigates the synthesis between human engineering craft and artificial intelligence at the lowest levels of computing hardware and software: operating systems, hypervisors, firmware, and microprocessor architecture.

Key tenets:
1. AI achieves its highest efficacy when guided by rigorous human domain knowledge, taste, and discipline.
2. Foundational systems should be small, transparent, verifiable, resilient, and enjoyable to understand.
3. Pair machine intelligence with modern systems languages (such as Zig) and open architectures (such as RISC-V) to build clean, maintainable infrastructure.

## Primary Projects

### 1. Diosix Hypervisor
- **Website**: https://diosix.org/
- **Repository**: https://github.com/diodesign/diosix
- **Target Architecture**: 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) with hypervisor extensions (H-extension) and M-mode/S-mode/U-mode privilege levels.
- **Implementation Language**: Zig (migrated from Rust to achieve balanced safety, productivity, and bare-metal clarity).
- **Core Architecture**: Microkernel / hypervisor design providing hardware-enforced virtual machine isolation, deterministic memory mapping, physical/virtual core scheduling, and zero-overhead guest execution.
- **Distributed Computing Vision**: Ongoing research toward self-organizing distributed computing networks where localized machine reasoning assists autonomous virtual machine nodes to cooperatively balance workloads and heal failures.

### 2. Diosix Agent Skills
- **Repository**: https://github.com/diodesign/diosix-agent-skills
- **Purpose**: Specialized agent skills designed for autonomous AI agents (Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Claude Code, etc.) to author, review, refactor, and audit idiomatic Zig 0.14+ hypervisor code, assembly stubs, and technical documentation.
- **Capabilities**: Includes architectural guidelines, memory model constraints, security audit checklists, and documentation standards.

### 3. RISC-V Silicon & Datapath Explorer
- **Host**: https://diodesign.org/
- **Function**: Interactive, real-time instruction set architecture (ISA) explorer and single-cycle datapath visualizer for RV32I and RV64I.
- **Capabilities**: Enables tactile bit-flipping across 32 instruction bits, live two-way assembly/disassembly, control signal decomposition, immediate field decoding (R/I/S/B/U/J types), and SVG circuit datapath animation.

## People & Contact

- **Founder & Lead Engineer**: Chris Williams
- **Email**: chrisw@diosix.org
- **GitHub**: https://github.com/diodesign
- **Bluesky**: https://bsky.app/profile/diodesign.org
- **LinkedIn**: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diodesign/
- **Keybase**: https://keybase.io/diodesign